World News Quick Take

Agencies

Wed, May 22, 2013 - Page 7

INDIA

Li to honor doctor

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) was to pay his respects yesterday to the family of an Indian doctor who died treating Chinese troops more than 70 years ago, becoming a rare symbol of friendship between the two nations. Li was to take time out of his busy visit to meet relatives of Dwarkanath Kotnis, who provided emergency medical aid for four years during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945. Manorama Kotnis, the doctor’s only surviving sibling, was to meet Li in Mumbai. While ties between Beijing and New Delhi have often been strained, with a legacy of distrust from a border war in 1962, Kotnis has remained a widely revered figure in China for his war work, which cost him his life. Born in Maharashtra State, he was one of five medical volunteers dispatched from India in 1938, following a request for help. Manorama said the team was only supposed to go for a year, but her brother stayed on for four years, joining the Chinese Communist Party and marrying a Chinese nurse, with whom he had a son a few months before he died of epilepsy in 1942, aged 32.

JAPAN

Mayor accuses S Koreans

South Korean soldiers were guilty of abusing women in wartime, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said in comments reported yesterday, days after he provoked a storm by labeling World War II “comfort women” a military necessity. In a remark that provoked a sharp response from Seoul, Hashimoto said the South Korean military used women for sex during the Vietnam War. The comfort women issue is a particularly sensitive one in South Korea, whose people made up many of the about 200,000 “comfort women” forcibly drafted into brothels for the Japanese military during the war. Hashimoto said last week these women served a “necessary” role keeping battle-stressed soldiers in line.

SINGAPORE

Scientist killed: US expert

A US scientist found hanged in the city-state last year was murdered and his death made to look like a suicide as part of a conspiracy, a US pathologist told an inquiry yesterday. Edward Adelstein, 75, a deputy medical examiner in Missouri, contradicted police findings that Shane Todd killed himself, but admitted his conclusions were based on pictures of the body and circumstantial information. Todd’s parents say their son was killed in June last year because of his work for a research institute with alleged links to a Chinese firm accused of involvement in espionage. “The cause of death of Dr Todd was strangulation by a ligature around his neck,” Adelstein said in a written statement admitted as evidence yesterday at a the inquiry. “I would rule his death a murder — a homicide.” He said Todd was “a very dangerous person” to the two Asian companies, and asserted without offering any evidence that “they had him killed” and well-trained “assassins” may have been involved. Adelstein was engaged by the Todd family, who walked out of the inquest after Adelstein came under heavy questioning. They said they had “lost faith” in the proceedings.

AFGHANISTAN

Bomb kills six police

An official says a powerful roadside bomb has killed six policemen in the west. The officers’ vehicle hit the explosives planted in the road they were driving yesterday morning in Herat Province. District Police Chief Sher Agha says the explosion was so strong that the police truck was completely destroyed in the blast in Obey district. He says there were no survivors.